Lessons from Local Leaders:

Cheryl Laing

The Perfect Bite: How Cheryl Laing Built Rooted en Flavor Around the Belief That Food Should Knock Your Socks Off

She left corporate America, spent eight months in Madrid studying under chefs, traveled to Croatia and Greece, and came home with a philosophy: fresh ingredients, no shortcuts, every menu custom. The rest took care of itself.

Cheryl Laing will tell you she’s never stopped being nervous before an event. Even now, with a catering business that’s been booking steadily since its first holiday season and a client list that includes a celebrity dinner she still talks about with genuine wonder, the nerves show up every time. She knows the food is good. She just never stops wanting it to be great.

That instinct — not okay, not fine, genuinely great — is the engine behind Rooted en Flavor, the catering company Cheryl built from scratch after years in corporate America taught her that she was building the wrong thing. She knows how to market. She knows how to identify clients and get in front of them. What she wanted was to do all of that for something she actually loved.

Turns out the world was ready for her.

A Kitchen Was Always the Safe Place

Cheryl grew up in a household where cooking was the language of love. Her father made enough food to feed the whole block. Her family would go to restaurants specifically to reverse-engineer the dishes — figuring out the ingredients, debating how to make them better, playing with it at home. Food wasn’t fuel in that house. It was connection, creativity, and care all at once.

That foundation never left her, even when her path went through Georgetown University and then into investment banking. She was good at those things. The marketing skills she built at Georgetown’s business school became genuinely valuable. But she kept coming home to the kitchen, cooking to make herself happy after days that felt like they were building someone else’s dream.

The turning point was eight months in Madrid — first on an internship with a hospitality and event planning company, then studying under chefs, absorbing the city’s approach to food. What struck her most wasn’t complexity. It was simplicity done right. Fresh tangerines instead of bottled citrus. A tortilla built from eggs and potatoes and nothing processed. Dishes that were cleaner, healthier, and somehow more flavorful for what they left out.

“Every time I travel, I experience the city through food,” she says. “It’s my most favorite thing to do.”

She took that philosophy to Croatia, to Greece, wherever she went — learning from chefs, tasting, absorbing. Then she came home, quit her job, developed the LLC, built the marketing plan, and launched Rooted en Flavor.

The First Holiday Season

She knew from her marketing background that overnight success is mostly a myth. Things take time. You have to get through the system. People have to find you. She was mentally prepared for a slow start.

Then September arrived and the holiday inquiries started coming in, one after another. She remembers being genuinely stunned. She prayed over the first hire. She was nervous the whole time. And then she got the feedback, and the next booking, and the next. There were stretches of the holiday season where she didn’t sleep for 36 hours at a time, working through the demand she hadn’t quite expected to arrive so fast.

“I was like — you guys just want me? You want me to cook for you?” she says, laughing at the memory. “It was so surreal going from slacks and a button-down to really charting my own path and diving into what I felt like I was meant to do the whole time.”

No Frozen. No Processed. Never the Same Menu Twice.

The philosophy behind Rooted en Flavor is straightforward and almost impossible to maintain at scale — which is exactly why Cheryl has no interest in scaling beyond her ability to maintain it.

Every menu is custom. Not slightly adjusted — completely built from scratch for each client, based on their preferences, their event, their palate. Cheryl sources fresh ingredients from farmers markets and quality vendors, not because it’s a marketing angle but because she knows what subpar ingredients do to a dish. If you start broken, she says, you can’t build something amazing.

This approach means Rooted en Flavor is not the right choice for everyone, and Cheryl is clear about that. Some clients want big-box catering — volume, familiarity, something to fill plates. Those aren’t her clients. Her clients want to savor the moment, to actually taste what they’re eating, to feel the care that went into it.

She prices by ingredient type and number of guests, which means quality costs what quality costs. But what people are paying for is more than the food. They’re inviting someone into their home or their personal space and trusting them with what goes into their body and what their guests will remember. That level of trust comes with a corresponding level of care.

“I would like people to serve me that way when I’m at a restaurant,” she says. “So that’s what I’m going to do for everybody else.”

Warmth Is the Goal

Plated dinners are Cheryl’s favorite. She loves the ritual of explaining each course, watching guests lean in, seeing the expressions when something lands exactly right. She has been called an inspiration in clients’ kitchens more than once — people wanting to know her story, surprised to learn she never went to culinary school, fascinated by the model she built around traveling and learning directly from chefs around the world.

What she hopes people feel when they gather around something she’s prepared is warmth. That’s the word she uses without hesitating. Food settles something in people — in their bodies, in their minds, in the room. It slows things down. It creates space for the conversation that might not have happened otherwise. It’s the reason her father used to cook for the entire block.

That same spirit extends to how she runs her team. Her servers eat when the clients eat. She’s not going to have people working hard for her all night and send them home hungry. The kitchen gets left the way it was found — or better. Floors swept, dishes done, counters clean. She doesn’t charge extra for it. It’s part of the hospitality, not a line item.

“It’s not just in the scope of work,” she says. “We’re there to make sure the entire experience is a success.”

Reading the Shift

Cheryl is watching the food industry change in real time and finding it validating. The era of 50-page diner menus and chain restaurants on every corner is giving way to something smaller, more intentional, more accountable. Consumers are reading ingredient labels. They’re connecting how they eat to how they feel. They’re asking who is responsible for what’s going into their bodies.

She’s been operating this way since before it was a trend. Quality over quantity has always been the model at Rooted en Flavor — fewer things, done exceptionally well, for clients who actually care about the difference.

She sees the same shift happening in restaurants: tighter menus, cleaner sourcing, more honesty about what a kitchen does and doesn’t do well. A Michelin-starred burger place that only makes burgers and fries but makes them perfectly. A diner that knows its lane and executes it. She’s here for all of it.

What Comes Next

Cheryl has a retirement plan: move to Madrid, open a small cafe, make her favorite things. Everything before that is about building something worth passing on.

The growth she envisions for Rooted en Flavor is deliberate — expanding to other cities, potentially with investors, but only in ways that preserve what makes it what it is. The tailored experience. The custom menus. The quality that becomes impossible once you grow too fast. She knows that staying true to those things means staying selective about who she works with and how big she gets.

“Quality over quantity,” she says. “We really value that.”

The goal has never been fame or a restaurant empire. It’s been to put more into the world than she takes from it. To give people a meal they actually remember. To be the kind of business that leads with humility, takes care of the people who make it run, and leaves every kitchen cleaner than she found it.

That, and to knock your socks off every single time.

Cheryl Laing is the founder of Rooted en Flavor Catering, serving clients across the region for private dinners, corporate events, weddings, and celebrations of all kinds. Visit https://rootedenflavor.com/ or email enjoy@rootedenflavor.com to connect with her team.

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